Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited is a Live
Performance Series choreographed by Web code.
In the performance of
wikipedia.org on December 11, 2008, five dancers, the audience, and the artist shaped together the course of the performance.
The source code of the website - its HTML tags - were interpreted live on stage into new dance movements, which were immediately translated into text-based
descriptions and then stored online into the (text-based) html-movement-library. This information was reused on stage as new instruction material. As the data performance
progressed, more html-movements were developed, stored and altered by the participants.
The inclusion of the html-movement-library on stage enabled a simultaneous exchange of instruction and performance, data and movement input and output
equally, and a continuous transfer between Web and body.

Layout of the performance space. Click to see a docu-movie of the show. Click on thumbnails to view larger scale images.

The audience was lead into the "machine-room" of the Live/Web performance in small-scale groups of 5-10 people. The performance space consisted of three main
areas: In the front area, the HTML tags of wikipedia's live Website were interpreted "on the fly" by a solo-dancer into movements. In the center area, these movements
were interpreted into text and saved to the database. And in the third area, in the back, the already into descriptions interpreted movements were again translated
into dance.

Corresponding to the main philosopy of Wikipedia, the public was invited to participate in the event. The audience could sit down (joining the artist) at the table of the
html-movement-library, and entry their own interpretations of the solo-dancer's movements into the database. These entries were automatically integrated into the
data transfer and became immediatley available for the performance. The audience was also invited to test the solo-dance area and create their own
movement ideas.

The performance of wikipedia took place at LABfactory in Vienna, and was developed together with
AIKO and her dance workshop (Yolanda Espinoza, Daniela Hofbauer, Eva Leopold, Paul Sezeny)